Dragon Secrets (Volume 2) (Magic Zero) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Thomas E. Sniegoski is the author of more than two dozen novels for adults, teens, and children. His books for teens include Legacy, Sleeper Code, Sleeper Agenda, and Force Majeure, as well as the series The Brimstone Network. As a comic book writer, Sniegoski’s work includes Stupid, Stupid Rat Tails, a prequel miniseries to international hit, Bone. Sniegoski collaborated with Bone creator Jeff Smith on the project, making him the only writer Smith has ever asked to work on those characters. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his wife LeeAnne and their French Bulldog, Kirby. Visit him on the web at Sniegoski.com.

Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as The House of Last Resort, All Hallows, Road of Bones, and the Stoker Award-winning Ararat, among many others. Golden cocreated (with Mike Mignola) the fan-favorite comic book series Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. He has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and the online animated series Ghosts of Albion (with Amber Benson). His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. He has been nominated eleven times in eight different categories for the Bram Stoker Award, and has won twice. In 2023, Golden and Amber Benson cowrote and codirected the Audible Original podcast Slayers: A Buffyverse Story. Please visit him at ChristopherGolden.com.

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Dragon Secrets

CHAPTER ONE

Timothy Cade stood on the ocean floor, rocked by the rhythm of the water, and he gazed around at the wondrous undersea landscape. It was so peaceful beneath the waves. He had always found a cool serenity there, as though it were a dream. Reeds flapped like banners, pushed and pulled by the deep tide. Dozens of breeds of fish swam in these waters, a kaleidoscope of colors in motion. Burrow crabs skittered from beneath clumps of prickly plants into the warrens of coral that jutted from the ocean bottom, pale castles that looked as though they had been carved of bone.

He wore a tunic into which he had sewn pockets that were filled with enough sand to weigh him down. In his hands, Timothy carried a speargun, a device that had been simple for him to construct. All he needed to do was pump the barrel several times to increase pressure inside the chamber and then pull the trigger, and the short spear would fire, its flint-rock tip slicing the water. In his first excursions below the waves, he had quickly learned that though some fish were good to eat and some served other purposes, none of them was easy to catch. And some of them were truly dangerous.

Timothy breathed slowly, hearing his inhalations inside his head, and he was careful not to disrupt the air tube that trailed behind him, leading up to the surface and then to the shore. At his end the tube had a mouthpiece he fastened to his face with Yaquis tree sap and straps that tied behind his head. On the other end, back on the shore, was the air pump, a device that used the crash of the waves, the pull of the tide, to drive the bellows that sent air down the tube. As a young boy, Timothy had been single-minded when an idea for a new invention struck him. At the age of eight he had discovered that a hollowed-out length of Lemboo plant was pliant, durable, and waterproof. Weeks later, he had laid enough of it end to end—connections wrapped in an elastic sheath of boar skin—that he could walk a full minute straight out from the shore into the water and still have air.

The combination of his speargun and the air tube made it simple to catch fish or to scavenge other things off the ocean floor. Yet it was not fishing that had drawn him beneath the waves to begin with. He still preferred the calming, almost meditative experience of fishing off the jetty to submerging himself in search of dinner. No, what he loved best about the underwater world was the sense of discovery.

Until recently, Timothy had spent his entire youth on the tiny Island of Patience, which sat in the vast ocean of an unknown world. There might have been other islands, entire continents, species of intelligent creatures, on that world, but Timothy had never encountered them. The island had been his only home, and it was small enough that he could have walked all the way around it in a day and a night. It was so small, in fact, that when he had realized he could venture into the ocean, it was one of the happiest days of his young life.

Timothy had found a mystery to explore.

In time, of course, he came to know the ocean floor all around Patience as well as he knew the island itself. But with the surge of the tides and the migrations of the ocean life, the sea changed far more than the land. And so he returned from time to time to explore the waters, examine a plant he had not studied before, or capture a fish whose flavor he had not enjoyed when cooked over a fire, wondering if his tastes had changed with age. More Lemboo tubes were added, to give him greater range in his marine exploration, but he knew that his crude breathing apparatus would never let him explore as deeply as he wished.

The ocean remained a mystery that he had only begun to investigate.

Now, as he walked along the spongy bottom, speargun in hand, eyes long since grown immune to the sting of salt water, he recalled the lingering sadness of curiosity. He had been curious about what lay beyond the island, above and below the water. But he had been far more curious about the world of his birth and about the city of Arcanum where his father was still living—his father, the great mage Argus Cade.

A whiskerfish darted past Timothy, only inches from his face. He smiled, catching himself before the smile grew too wide. If he stretched his face too much, it could unseal the sap he had used to glue the mouthpiece to his skin.

Troublemaker, he thought, glaring at the whiskerfish, which paused and then came back toward him, dancing in the water, wanting to play. Several others came out from the cover of the reeds and soon they were flitting about, chasing one another.

Then all of them froze, sensing the arrival of something else, something they feared.

The small school of whiskerfish scattered, hiding, and a moment later a muck eel sliced through the water, shimmying to the ocean floor and snaking along the bottom in search of prey. It ignored Timothy completely. He was so alien to this place that most of the predatory marine life did not seem to take an interest in him. Most. Poison sponges and bladefins could be very dangerous, but they rarely came into shallower waters when the sun shone brightly above.

Most of the marine life Timothy had been forced to name himself. Some of them were similar to creatures from the world of his birth, and those he had named based upon the pictures he had seen in books his father had brought.

Father. Once more his mind turned to Argus Cade.

All through Timothy’s youth, his father had visited him regularly. A magical doorway would appear above the red sands of the island’s shore, and his father would arrive to bring him supplies—food and fabric and books—and sit with him and talk of love and magic and of his mother, who had died giving birth to Timothy. His father had taught him to read and to write and the basics of numbers and science. But by the age of four, the boy had already learned much of what could be taught from those books, and he had yearned for more, longed to explore with his mind just as much as with his body.

That was his own type of magic. For though his body was confined to the island, his mind could wander as far as his imagination and his intellect could take him. So he had built his workshop, and he had begun to invent the things that made his life on the Island of Patience more comfortable and more interesting.

Patience. Timothy had given the island that name himself. It was his life, really. Everything he had. He had to have patience between his father’s visits, and patience each time he asked the old mage if he would ever be able to return to the world of his birth.

“Some day, I hope,” his father would say.

But Timothy could hear another answer in his voice. The world of mages, the realm from which he came, was ruled entirely by magic. It was in the air, in the ground, in every structure, and in every man, woman, and child.

All except for Timothy Cade.

He was a freak, a monster, an abomination, who never should have been born. Or, at least, those were the slurs Argus Cade feared would be hurled upon his son. He had been certain that Timothy would be in danger, that there would be those who would want to destroy him, as if this infant un-magician could infect the world with a contagion of un-magic.

So Argus had used his great power to hide his son away, to open a door to another dimension and keep Timothy safe.

Though the boy had been lonely, he had been safe,...